Status Updates From Hidden City: Adventures and...

Needless to say, an orderly queue would speed up the whole process and be fairer, but it would be contrary to the ways of Dublin, and I can't help but feel it would detract from the festive anarchy you invartiably encounter at the city's bus stops.

It struck me that when Bono flushed his toilet, this was where his waste would end up.

... ever happened on the campus.

Vickers told me that during periods of heavy rainfall the pressure in the sewer at UCD had been known to become so great that the manhole cover--which took two people to lift--had been blown off and sewage and other detritus spread to a distance of ten meters around its opening. I had spent a largely uneventful periodstudying in UCD, and it struck me that this was by some distance the most exciting thing that had

Part of writing about a place is imagining what it might be like if it weren't there at all.

about Poolbeg Peninsula:

In a sense, it was as close as you'll ever get to authentic independent Irish land: built on rubbish, overpriced, unattractive yet unaccountably coveted, and sometimes even loved.

Ireland was young, but the Poolbeg Peninsula was younger, and its fortunes reflected those of the independent nation.

Poolbeg--where love was, lost, found, and let to the sea again.

Mention of the James Joyce statue at UCD.

I remember wondering at the tatty grandeur of Pearse station as stray beams of sunlight cut through its dusty, cracked windows.

The Gaelic /dubb linn/—‘black pool’—was adopted by the Vikings for the name of their settlement Dyflin.

It was, it had always seemed to me, a city defined more by its margins than by its centre, and more by its hidden places than it’s obvious landmarks.